Quotation marks, also called quotes, quote marks, quotemarks, speech marks and inverted commas, are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to set off direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same character.[1]

Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media.

The double quotation mark is older than the single. It derives from a marginal notation used in fifteenth-century manuscript annotations to indicate a passage of particular importance (not necessarily a quotation); the notation was placed in the outside margin of the page and was repeated alongside each line of the passage. By the middle sixteenth century, printers (notably in Basel, Switzerland) had developed a typographic form of this notation, resembling the modern closing or right-hand double quotation mark. During the seventeenth century this treatment became specific to quoted material, and it grew common, especially in Britain, to print quotation marks (now in the modern opening and closing forms) at beginning and end of the quotation as well as in the margin; the French usage (see under Specific language features below) is a survival of this. In most other languages, including English, the marginal marks dropped out of use in the last years of the eighteenth century.

The single quotation mark emerged around 1800 as a means of indicating a secondary level of quotation.

Mention in another work of a title of a short or subsidiary work, like a chapter or episode: "Encounter at Farpoint" was the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Scare quotes used to mean "so-called" or to express irony: Your "car" doesn't actually have any wheels.

In American English, double quotes are used normally (the "primary" style). If quote marks are used inside another pair of quote marks, then single quotes are used as the "secondary" style. For example: "Didn't she say 'I like red best' when asked her favorite wine?" he wondered to himself.

If another set of quotes is nested, double quotes are used again, and they continue to alternate as necessary (though this is rarely done). British English tends to have the opposite convention – single quotes are primary, and double quotes are secondary; however, this distinction dates back only to about 1900, earlier British usage being identical to American. Different varieties of English have different rules regarding whether neighboring punctuation should be written inside or outside the quotation marks.

Typographically, there are two types of quotation marks:

'…' and "…", are known as neutral, vertical, straight, typewriter, or "dumb" quotation marks. The left and right marks are identical.

‘…’ and “…”, are known as typographic, curly, curved, or book quotes. The left (start) and right (end) forms are different, resemble small figures six and nine raised above the baseline (like 6...9 and 66...99), but then solid, i.e., with the counters filled. In many typefaces, the shapes are the same as those of an inverted (upside down) and normal comma.

Curved quotation marks are usually used in manuscript and typeset text. Because typewriter and computer keyboards lack keys to directly enter typographic quotation marks, much typed writing has vertical quotation marks. The "smart quotes" feature in some computer software can convert vertical quotation marks to curly ones, but sometimes does so imperfectly.

The closing single quotation mark is identical or similar in form (depending on the font) to the apostrophe and similar to the prime symbol. However, these three characters have quite different purposes. The double quotation mark is similar to—and often used to represent—the ditto mark and the double prime symbol.

Google's machine translation is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.

Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.

The standard form in the preceding table is taught in schools and used in handwriting. Most large newspapers have kept these „low-high” quotation marks, but otherwise the alternative form with single or double “English-style” quotes is now often the only form seen in printed matter. Neutral quotation marks (" and ') are used widely, especially in texts typed on computers and on websites.[22]

Although not generally common in Dutch any more, double angle quotation marks are still sometimes used in Belgium. Examples include the Flemish HUMO magazine and the Metro newspaper in Brussels.[23]

Google's machine translation is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.

Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.

The symbol used as the “left quote” in English is used as the right quote in Germany and Austria, and a different “low 9 quote” is used for the left instead. Some fonts, e.g. Verdana, were designed not bearing in mind the automatic use of the English left quote as the German right quote and are therefore typographically incompatible with German.

This style of quoting is also used in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Georgian, Icelandic, Russian, Slovak, Slovene and in Ukrainian. In Bulgarian, Icelandic, Russian and Ukrainian, single quotation marks are not used. The double-quote style is also used in the Netherlands, but is now out of fashion — nowadays the 'English-style' quotation marks are preferred—it is still frequently found on older shop sign and is used by a most large newspapers.

Sometimes, especially in books, the angle quotation marks (see below) are used in Germany and Austria, albeit in reversed order: »A«. In Switzerland, however, the same quotation marks as in French are used: «A».

Double-angle quotation marks without spaces are the standard for German printed texts in Switzerland:

Andreas fragte mich: «Hast du den Artikel ‹EU-Erweiterung› gelesen?»

Andreas asked me: ‘Have you read the “EU Expansion” article?’

Angle quotation marks are also often used in German publications from Germany and Austria, especially in novels, but then exactly reversed and without spacing:

In Finnish and Swedish, right quotes called citation marks, ”...”, are used to mark both the beginning and the end of a quote. Double right-pointing angular quotes, »…», can also be used.

Alternatively, an en-dash followed by a (non-breaking) space can be used to denote the beginning of quoted speech, in which case the end of the quotation is not specifically denoted (see section Quotation dash below). A line-break should not be allowed between the en-dash and the first word of the quotation.

French language uses angle quotation marks (guillemets, or duck-foot quotes), adding a quarter-em space (officially) (U+2005four-per-em space (HTML &#8197;)) within the quotes. However, many people now use the non-breaking space, because the difference between a non-breaking space and a four-per-em is virtually imperceptible (but also because the Unicode quarter-em space is breakable), and the quarter-em is virtually always omitted in non-Unicode fonts. Even more commonly, people just put a normal (breaking) space between the quotation marks because the non-breaking space is often not easily accessible from the keyboard.

French single angle quotes (left and right), alternate form for embedded quotations, used on the web with normal non-breaking spaces.

‹ A ›

French single angle quotes (left and right), alternate form for embedded quotations, preferably used by typographers with narrow non-breaking spaces.

Initially, the French guillemet characters were not angle shaped but also used the comma (6/9) shape. They were different from English quotes because they were standing (like today's guillemets) on the baseline (like lowercase letters), and not above it (like apostrophes and English quotation marks) or hanging down from it (like commas). At the beginning of the 19th century, this shape evolved to look like (( small parentheses )). The angle shape appeared later to increase the distinction and avoid confusions with apostrophes, commas and parentheses in handwritten manuscripts submitted to publishers. Unicode currently does not provide alternate codes for these 6/9 guillemets on the baseline, which are still considered as form variants implemented in older French typography (such as the Didot font design). Also there was not necessarily any distinction of shape between the opening and closing guillemets, with both types pointing to the right (like today's French closing guillemets).

They must be used with non-breaking spaces (preferably narrow, if available, i.e. U+202F NNBSP which is missing in most computer fonts but that renderers should be able to render using the same glyph as the breaking "French" thin space U+2009, handling the non-breaking property internally in the text renderer / layout engine, because line-breaking properties are never defined in fonts themselves; such renderers should also be able to infer a half-width space from the glyph assigned to the normal half-em non-breaking space, if the thin space itself is not mapped).

In many printed books, when quotations are spanning multiple lines of text (including multiple paragraphs), an additional closing quotation sign is traditionally used at the beginning of each line continuing a quotation ; any right-pointing guillemet at the beginning of a line does not close the current quotation; this convention has been consistently used since the beginning of the 19th century by most book printers (and is still in use today). Note that such insertion of continuation quotation marks will also occur if there's a word hyphenation break. There is still no support for automatic insertion of these continuation guillemets in HTML/CSS and in many word-processors, so these have to be inserted by manual typesetting:

In this case, when there should be two adjacent opening or closing marks, only one is written:

Il répondit : « Ce n’est qu’un « gadget ! ».

He answered: “It's only a ‘gizmo’”.

The use of English quotation marks is increasing in French and usually follows English rules, for instance when the keyboard or the software context doesn't allow the utilisation of guillemets. The French news site L'Humanité uses straight quotation marks.

English quotes are also used sometimes for nested quotations:

« Son “explication” n’est qu’un mensonge », s’indigna le député.

“His ‘explanation’ is just a lie”, the deputy protested.

But the most frequent convention used in printed books for nested quotations is to style them in italics (single quotation marks are much more rarely used, and multiple levels of quotations using the same marks is often considered confusing for readers):

« Son explication n’est qu’un mensonge », s’indigna le député.

Il répondit : « Ce n’est qu’un gadget ! ».

Further, running speech does not use quotation marks beyond the first sentence, as changes in speaker are indicated by a dash, as opposed to the English use of closing and re-opening the quotation. (For other languages employing dashes, see section Quotation dash below.) The dashes may be used entirely without quotation marks as well. In general, quotation marks are extended to encompass as much speech as possible, including not just non-spoken text such as "he said" (as previously noted), but also as long as the conversion extends. The quotation marks end at the last spoken text however, not extending to the end of paragraphs when the final part is not spoken.

According to current recommendation by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences the main Hungarian quotation marks are comma-shaped double quotation marks set on the base-line at the beginning of the quote and at apostrophe-height at the end of it for first level, inversed »French quotes« without space (the German tradition) for the second level, so the following nested quotation pattern emerges:

„Quote »inside« quote”

… and with third level:

„Quote »inside ’inside of inside’ inside« quote”

In Hungarian linguistic tradition the meaning of a word is signified by uniform (unpaired) apostrophe-shaped quotation marks:

According to current PN-83/P-55366 standard from 1983 (but not dictionaries, see below), Typesetting rules for composing Polish text (Zasady składania tekstów w języku polskim) one can use either „ordinary Polish quotes” or «French quotes» (without space) for first level, and ‚single Polish quotes’ or «French quotes» for second level, which gives three styles of nested quotes:

„Quote ‚inside’ quote”

„Quote «inside» quote”

«Quote ‚inside’ quote»

There is no space on the internal side of quote marks, with the exception of ¼ firet (~ ¼ em) space between two quotation marks when there are no other characters between them (e.g. ,„ and ’”).

The above rules have not changed since at least the previous BN-76/7440-02 standard from 1976 and are probably much older.

However, the part of the rules that concerns the use of quillemets conflicts with the Polish punctuation standard as given by dictionaries, including the Wielki Słownik Ortograficzny PWN recommended by the Polish Language Council. The PWN rules state:

In specific uses, guillemets also appear. Guillemet marks pointing inwards are used for highlights and in case a quotation occurs inside a quotation. Guillemet marks pointing outwards are used for definitions (mainly in scientific publications and dictionaries), as well as for enclosing spoken lines and indirect speech, especially in poetic texts.[24]

In Polish books and publications, this style for use of guillemets (also known as »German quotes«) is used almost exclusively. In addition to being standard for second level quotes, guillemet quotes are sometimes used as first level quotes in headings and titles but almost never in ordinary text in paragraphs.

Another style of quoting is to use an em-dash to open a quote; this is used almost exclusively to quote dialogues, and is virtually the only convention used in works of fiction.

In Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Latvian, angled quotation marks are used without spaces. In case of quoted material inside a quotation, rules[25] and most noted style manuals prescribe the use of different kinds of quotation marks. However, some of them[26] allow to use the same quotation marks for quoted material inside a quotation, and if inner and outer quotation marks fall together, then one of them should be omitted.

Right:

Пушкин писал Дельвигу: «Жду „Цыганов“ и тотчас тисну».

(Pushkin wrote to Delvig: “Waiting for ‘Gypsies’, and publish at once”.)

Permissible, when it is technically impossible to use different quotation marks:

“This is an example of how a literal quotation is usually written in Spanish.”

And, when quotations are nested in more levels than inner and outer quotation, the system is:[27]

«Antonio me dijo: “Vaya ‘cacharro’ que se ha comprado Julián”».

As in French, the use of English quotation marks is increasing in Spanish, and the El País style guide, which is widely followed in Spain, recommends them. Latin Americans often use them, owing to influence from the United States.

In the Chinese language, double angle brackets are used around titles of books, documents, musical pieces, cinema films, TV programmes, newspapers, magazines, laws, etc. When nested, single angle brackets are used inside double angle brackets. With some exceptions, this usage overlaps italics in English:

“你看过《三国演义》吗？”，他问我。

"Have you read Romance of the Three Kingdoms?", he asks me.

White corner brackets are used to mark quote-within-quote segments.[clarification needed (In all the above locations and circumstances? If so, should this sentence be added before the last one in this section's 1st paragraph?)]

This style is particularly common in Bulgarian, Esperanto, French, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.[21]James Joyce always insisted on this style, although his publishers did not always respect his preference. Alan Paton used this style in Cry, the Beloved Country (and no quotation marks at all in some of his later work). Charles Frazier used this style for his novel Cold Mountain as well. Details for individual languages are given above.

The dash is often combined with ordinary quotation marks. For example, in French, a guillemet may be used to initiate running speech, with each change in speaker indicated by a dash, and a closing guillemet to mark the end of the quotation.

Dashes are also used in many modern Englishnovels, especially those written in non-standard dialects. Some examples include:

You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers, in which spoken dialogues are written with the typical English quotation marks, but dialogues imagined by the main character (which feature prominently) are written with quotation dashes.

In Italian, Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Georgian, Romanian, Lithuanian and Hungarian the reporting clause in the middle of a quotation is separated with two additional dashes:

“You don't seem to be anything special,” said Korkala almost sadly, “but there's no help to it.”

— Frakki, älähti Huikari. — Missä on frakki?

— Räätälissä, sanoi Joonas rauhallisesti.

“Tailcoat”, yelped Huikari. “Where is the tailcoat?”

“At the tailor's”, said Joonas calmly.

The Unicode standard introduced a separate character U+2015―horizontal bar to be used as a quotation dash. In general it is the same length as an em-dash, and so this is often used instead. The main difference between them is that at least some software will insert a line break after an em dash, but not after a quotation dash. Both are displayed in the following table.

"Ambidextrous" quotation marks were introduced on typewriters to reduce the number of keys on the keyboard, and were inherited by computer keyboards and character sets. Some computer systems designed in the past had character sets with proper opening and closing quotes. However, the ASCII character set, which has been used on a wide variety of computers since the 1960s, only contains a straight single quote (U+0027'apostrophe) and double quote (U+0022"quotation mark).

Many systems, such as the personal computers of the 1980s and early 1990s, actually drew these quotes like curved closing quotes on-screen and in printouts, so text would appear like this (approximately):

”Good morning, Dave,” said HAL.

’Good morning, Dave,’ said HAL.

These same systems often drew the grave accent (`, U+0060) as an open quote glyph (actually a high-reversed-9 glyph, to preserve some usability as a grave). This gives a proper appearance at the cost of semantic correctness. Nothing similar was available for the double quote, so many people resorted to using two single quotes for double quotes, which would look like the following:

‛‛Good morning, Dave,’’ said HAL.

‛Good morning, Dave,’ said HAL.

The typesetting application TeX still uses this convention for input files. However, the appearance of these characters has varied greatly from font to font. On systems which provide straight quotes and grave accents like most do today (and as Unicode specifies) the result is poor as shown here:

``Good morning, Dave,'' said HAL.

`Good morning, Dave,' said HAL.

The Unicode slanted/curved quotes described below are shown here for comparison:

Historically support for curved quotes was a problem in information technology, primarily because the widely used ASCII character set did not include a representation for them. To use non ASCII characters in e-mail and on Usenet the sending mail application needs to set a MIME type specifying the encoding. In most cases, (the exceptions being if UTF-7 is used or if the 8BITMIME extension is present), this also requires the use of a content-transfer encoding.

Curved and straight quotes are also sometimes referred to as smart quotes (“…”) and regular quotes ("…") respectively; these names are in reference to the name of a function found in several word processors that automatically converts straight quotes typed by the user into curved quotes, attempting to be "smart" enough to determine which typed quotes are opening and closing.

Since curved quotes are the typographically correct ones, word processors have traditionally offered curved quotes to users. Before Unicode was widely accepted and supported, this meant representing the curved quotes in whatever 8-bit encoding the software and underlying operating system was using. The character sets for Windows and Macintosh used two different pairs of values for curved quotes, and ISO 8859-1 (historically the default character set for the Unixes and older Linux systems) has no curved quotes, making cross-platform compatibility difficult to implement.

Compounding the problem is the "smart quotes" feature mentioned above, which some word processors (including Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org) use by default. With this feature typically enabled by default, users may not have realized that the ASCII-compatible straight quotes they were typing on their keyboards ended up as something different.

Further, the "smart quotes" feature converts opening apostrophes (such as in 'tis, 'em, 'til, and '89) into opening single quotation marks—essentially upside-down apostrophes. An example of this error appears in the advertisements for the television show 'Til Death.

Unicode support has since become the norm for operating systems. Thus, in at least some cases, transferring content containing curved quotes (or any other non-ASCII characters) from a word processor to another application or platform has been less troublesome, provided all steps in the process (including the clipboard if applicable) are Unicode-aware. But there are still applications which still use the older character sets, or output data using them, and thus problems still occur.

There are other considerations for including curved quotes in the widely used markup languages HTML, XML, and SGML. If the encoding of the document supports direct representation of the characters, they can be used, but doing so can cause difficulties if the document needs to be edited by someone who is using an editor that cannot support the encoding. For example, many simple text editors only handle a few encodings or assume that the encoding of any file opened is a platform default, so the quote characters may appear as "garbage". HTML includes a set of entities for curved quotes: &lsquo; (left single), &rsquo; (right single), &sbquo; (low 9 single), &ldquo; (left double), &rdquo; (right double), and &bdquo; (low 9 double). XML does not define these by default, but specifications based on it can do so, and XHTML does. In addition, while the HTML 4, XHTML and XML specifications allow specifying numeric character references in either hexadecimal or decimal, SGML and older versions of HTML (and many old implementations) only support decimal references. Thus, to represent curly quotes in XML and SGML, it is safest to use the decimal numeric character references. That is, to represent the double curly quotes use &#8220; and &#8221;, and to represent single curly quotes use &#8216; and &#8217;. Both numeric and named references function correctly in almost every modern browser. While using numeric references can make a page more compatible with outdated browsers, using named references are safer for systems that handle multiple character encodings (i.e. RSS aggregators and search results).

In Unicode, 29 characters are marked Quotation Mark=Yes by character property[30] . They all have general category "Punctuation", and a subcategory Open, Close, Initial, Final or Other (Ps, Pe, Pi, Pf, Po).

^ abThese codes for vertical-writing characters are for presentation forms in the Unicode CJK compatibility forms section. Typical documents use normative character codes which are shown for the horizontal writing in this table, and applications are usually responsible to render correct forms depending on the writing direction used.